Caddo Lake (2024), directed by Logan George & Celine Held, stars Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Caroline Falk, Lauren Ambrose, Eric Lange, Diana Hopper, Sam Hennings, and David Maldonado. The film follows two seemingly unrelated characters: Paris (O’Brien), a blue-collar swamp worker, and Ellie (Scanlen), a feisty teenager whose little sister goes missing on the mysterious Caddo Lake. After their investigations into the disappearance lead them down an otherworldly path, they find themselves in a desperate fight to survive. 

O’Brien is a quiet but emotionally resonant presence and Scanlen’s performance is impressive considering her age. The thing is, however likable their characters may be due to the performances, they’re pretty boring on paper. The script takes a solid amount of time to establish the various cookie-cutter characters, resulting in a particularly slow first act that fails to hook the viewer. 

The movie maintains a level of mystery throughout, but it’s often just confusing as opposed to compelling. Yes, the pieces come together more clearly by the end, but it’s tough to enjoy everything in the moment if you’re just scratching your head. It also takes its supernatural concept so seriously that it often sets up the expectation that it should make more sense than it does. It’s just so hyper-focused on the convoluted mystery that it forgets to simply entertain its audience. 

This brings me to one of my big issues with the movie: it feels far too derivative of the Netflix series, Dark (2017-2020). If you’ve seen the show, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, I won’t spoil it here. Either way, the show does the concept better. I also didn’t like that we constantly follow two characters who are frustratingly unconnected throughout the movie. Even if they connect by the end, I don’t care because the journey was simply confusing to the point where I didn’t care.

All this being said, I do think the movie works if a person doesn’t start asking too many questions. It’s not a bad movie in content, it’s just frustrating structurally. It’s almost as if the script is more interested in how the pieces fit together as opposed to making sure the individual pieces are compelling on an individual level. 

Overall, this is an extremely flawed M. Night Shyamalan-type mystery thriller that I feel was appropriate to release on streaming. For the genre, I actually found it to be a pretty boring experience. Some people will love it, and the pieces do fit together well in the end, it was just a bit tough to care. C+